Why I am a Liberal Christian

Sermon preached at Odyssey on Sunday 6th May 2007
at St Edward’s Church, Cambridge,
by the Prof. Michael Langford

Lessons: 2 Kings 5, 1-19; St John 16, 12-13

The account of Naaman and his healing from leprosy is one of many striking stories in the Old Testament. I particularly like the place where the general is outraged because instead of making a grand gesture, he is asked by Elisha to do something simple. However, the most interesting passage comes right at the end of today's lesson where Naaman asks "when my master goes into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leans on my hand, and I bow down myself in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon your servant in this thing. And Elisha said to him 'Go in peace'".

Within the Old Testament this is a rare case of where something similar to what we call 'toleration' is suggested. There are only a few other examples that come to mind, one of them being the toleration of the Jebusites, who seem to have been exempted from the general ethnic cleansing of Canaan, and were allowed to continue to live within their ancient city of Jerusalem. There is also the way in which Cyrus, though a foreign king, is seen as working God's purpose. However -- as we know only too well -- the sad truth is that toleration is not much in evidence, either in the Bible, or within the history of Christianity -- at least after the church came to have political significance during the fourth century.

However, toleration is one of the hallmarks of what I refer to as the 'liberal tradition' within Christianity -- a tradition that has rough equivalents in the other major religions, though I shall not expand on these today. This tradition, which is the theme of today's sermon, has only been called 'liberal' fairly recently -- in fact the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the first relevant usage is only in 1781, when Gibbon used it to mean "free from narrow prejudice". Formerly the tradition had other names, notably 'latitudinarian' and 'Arminian' in the seventeenth century, and earlier 'Alexandrine' -- because of the importance of Origen's teaching.

Toleration is one of a number of typical characteristics of the tradition, five of which I shall discuss today -- and some people will recognize a more general claim here about the use of words -- one that is closely associated with the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Many important words cannot be adequately defined in terms of one characteristic that is found in all examples; rather different examples are bound together because they share a collection of typical characteristics which are akin to family resemblances. In the case of what I am calling the liberal tradition, toleration is the first, and perhaps the most important of these characteristics. It is of course the case that nowadays a number of Christians who are not appropriately called 'liberal' also believe in toleration. Such people are 'liberal' in this respect, but it would be misleading to call their overall position 'liberal' unless they share all or most of the characteristics I am about to describe. [In a longer essay I would describe at least eleven of these typical characteristics.]

Toleration, needless to say, does not mean 'anything goes' -- especially when it comes to practice. Its essence is the claim that belief, especially religious belief, must be voluntary, and not subject to coercion. The early church stood by this conviction, but sadly, after Augustine it receded, with Protestants often being as keen to persecute those who differed from them as Catholics. However, there have been a series of noble exceptions, and these provide the seed for this crucial aspect of the liberal tradition. One such was Abelard, in the early twelfth century, another Sebastian Castellio, in the sixteenth, another, the Anglican bishop, Jeremy Taylor, in the seventeenth.

I want to say a little more about Castellio, one of the undersung heroes of the Christian church. Among the greatest biblical scholars of his day he was born a Catholic in Savoy, in 1515, but converted to Protestantism after seeing the execution of some Lutherans. Shortly afterwards he joined Calvin in Geneva, but then abandoned Calvinism, largely because of its intolerance. In 1554, horrified by the burning to death of Servetus in Geneva the year before, along with a colleague, he published the first classical defence of toleration in its modern sense, De haereticis, an sint persequendi (Concerning heretics, and whether they should be persecuted).

What is striking about this book is not only that it defends toleration; it gives a general defence for toleration that is still appropriate. In addition to arguments about the nature of Jesus, and the paradox of the cruelty practiced by many of his followers, he considers the question of when we have a right to certainty, and how this consideration allows us to insist on obedience to certain human laws, but not to matters of belief where there can be legitimate differences of opinion. This position is even more clearly expressed by Richard Hooker, in the 1590s, when he contrasts 'certainly of adherence' -- which is a kind of personal conviction -- and which we can properly have in religious matters,ii with 'certainty of evidence', which we do not have in respect to the kinds of issue that divide Christians.iii This is why persecution concerning such beliefs is wrong.

Here, it seems to me, both Castellio and Hooker put their finger of something of immense importance, even for our own time. For example, we can legitimately compel parents to send their children to school or to provide an equivalent education at home, but we cannot properly compel them to teach any particular faith system. There are grounds for our certainty that a basic education is necessary -- based on evidence -- but no equivalent, evidence-based certainty for particular religious (or political) beliefs. These beliefs may be more or less 'reasonable', but they cannot have the kind of evidential certainty found, say, in some areas of science.iv The liberal tradition in religion does not only preach toleration, it has a reasoned argument for it.

The second characteristic I shall focus on here is directly related to the first. One ground for intolerance has been the conviction that only those who follow a certain narrow path can be saved, while others are damned. This is why it is only fair to stress that some of those who have been intolerant have been motivated by a genuine concern for the people they have called heretics. Nevertheless, in contrast with such narrowness, liberals tend to affirm something like 'there are many paths to God'.

This suggestion, I find, is frequently misunderstood -- and in particular, I want to argue that it is perfectly consistent with the saying recorded in St John "no-one comes to the Father except by me" (14, 6). Here, we must recall that it is also St John who insists that Jesus is the eternal logos, or 'Word' of God, that shined in the world long before the birth in Bethlehem (1, 1-14). If we follow the thinking of Origen, writing in Alexandria in the third century, anyone who responds to God's Word, whether before or after the birth of Jesus, and whether or not they actually know the physical Jesus, is responding to God in the way that he comes to them. Hence Origen is happy to call Socrates and Plato Christians, because they responded to the logos, and therefore, to the eternal Christ.

Personally I prefer to put the matter a little differently, and -- for the sake of clarity -- only to use the term 'Christian' for those who not only respond to the logos, but who also articulate the belief that "the Word was made flesh" in Jesus. However, this way of seeing things makes it perfectly possible to say: one; Christians are those who follow Jesus and try to make him their Lord, and two; it is not only Christians who respond to God's Word. Hence there is no contradiction in saying both, that there are many paths to God, and that "no-one comes to the Father except through me" -- when the 'me', in the context of St John, is the eternal Word. To make this point even more clear, in the Platonic tradition, in which Origen writes, the Word of God comes to every person in whatever is seen by them as Good, or True, or Beautiful. It is this which enables a liberal Christian to say, with full consistency, that in so far as any person responds to the moral order as it impinges upon them, or to scientific and historical truth as they discover it, or to what is beautiful in art or nature, whether they know it or not, is responding to some aspect of God's Word to them. As I hope I have made clear, this does not mean that they are 'really' Christians, but it does mean that they have -- at least in part -- responded to the logos whom we know in Christ. Jesus is indeed 'the way, the truth and the life' -- but once again it is St John who relates this saying (14, 6) -- and once again in his context of the eternal logos.

I want to put the same idea in another way. It is one thing to say that there are many paths, it is another thing to say that there are many truths. I am saying the first, but not the second. Of course there are many paths that do not lead to God because any path that does must be a genuine response to God's Word, but this is still not at all the same thing as saying 'there are many truths'. Although I believe that there are important truths to be found in all the major religions of the world, I also believe that "The Word was made flesh" in Jesus, is a truth -- both an existential and a cosmic truth -- that only Christians articulate. Here there is, for me, an important truth at the heart of the Christian message, but the articulation of this truth is not a precondition of responding to God.

The third typical characteristic of the liberal tradition, and perhaps the best known, is a more flexible approach to the Bible than is usually found among 'conservatives'. Once again, I can use Castellio's writings to illustrate the point, in this case his 'Art of Doubting' (De arte dubitandi), published just before his death in 1563. In one passage he compares a Biblical narrative with the words of an ambassador who carries a message from his Lord. He begins by quoting the actual words he has been told to convey, but then, when he is asked to elaborate, he puts the essential message into his own words. In a similar way, Castellio is suggesting, some words in the Bible may correspond to actual words dictated to the writers by God, but others are the writers' attempts to convey a vision in their own words -- rather as a poet, who has experienced some extraordinary vision -- has to use human words to convey something that is almost indescribable. A little later the Cambridge Platonist, John Smith, Dean of Queens' College here in Cambridge, insisted that it is more appropriate if the actual words of the Bible are the prophets' own.v Somewhat later again, in the late 1700s, but still at a time when most Christians believed in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, we find the Quaker preacher, Hannah Barnard, scandalizing the London meeting houses by her insistence that when we read of the slaughter of women and children in the book of Joshua, we read what the writers of the book believed were God's commands, not what those commands actually were.vi [When Origen came to deal with the problems caused by ethnic cleansing in Canaan -- in his Homilies on Joshua -- he suggested (a) that we should stress the spiritual rather then the literal meaning of every passage, (b) that there was not always a literal meaning, (c) that in the case of the slaughters described by Joshua, the spiritual meaning referred to the destruction of vices within our hearts, and (d), that in any case, we must always interpret Scripture in a way that is worthy of God.]

I am one of those who argue that if we encourage scholars to apply to the Bible the same kind of critical tools that are used with respect to other ancient texts, the Bible actually stands out as a challenging witness to every honest reader. One is not compelled, by reason, to accept a literal belief in every part, for there is clearly a large amount of poetry, metaphor, and indeed legend, mixed up with the history, but what emerges when the Bible is taken as a whole is an amazing person, who lived and died in Palestine in the first century, and who invites the question "Who do you say that I am?"

I shall give two examples of considerations that support this positive appraisal of the Bible. First, in the case of most events in ancient history, say those concerning the life of Alexander the Great, the gap between the alleged events and the writing of the actual pieces of manuscript that we have, is usually hundreds of years. We are reading copies of copies of copies, etc. In the case of the New Testament the gap between the holographs (that is, the original writings) and the extant manuscripts of most books, is a mere 50 to 100 years. Nearly all scholars agree that most, if not all of the New Testament, was first written when the generation of eye witnesses was dying out; in the case Matthew, Mark and Luke, almost certainly, and in the case of John, very likely, in the second half of the first century. The actual manuscripts that we have, for most of the New Testament, date from only 150 to 200 AD (the Chester Beatty papyri). This argument, I repeat, is not designed to show that everything in the New Testament must be believed as literal truth, but that it is an historical source of huge importance.

Second, if we really believe that Jesus was an historical figure that lived and preached in Palestine, and that the New Testament, for the most part, records the evidence of eye witnesses, then our faith should lead us to approve the independent examination of the manuscripts. Nervousness about allowing scholarly and scientific investigation suggests a lack of faith rather than real trust.

The fourth characteristic comes as another surprise to many people. The liberal tradition accepts a doctrine of original 'sin' (hamartia or peccatum), meaning that human beings are born with a kind of moral weakness that makes it hard, if not impossible, to lead a perfect life.vii (Perhaps this is a natural consequence of our evolutionary past, which, by necessity, creates an element of egoism that was necessary for our survival.) Moreover, this weakness is linked to our social nature, and the way in which we are hugely influenced by our peers. However, this is not to be confused with a doctrine of original 'guilt' (culpa) -- meaning a belief that we are born with a guilt that involves a moral condemnation at birth. This latter view -- although accepted by many Christians, is (a) not Biblical, (b) not logical, and (c) rejected by liberal thinkers.

A major reason for the persistence in the bizarre belief in original guilt is a disastrous mistranslation of Romans 5, 12, where the Greek suggests something like "we all sin in the manner of Adam" but Jerome's Latin says that "we all sin in Adam" (in quo omnes peccaverunt). The early Mosaic tradition may have suggested that we can be punished for what our forefathers did, but Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 18 clearly reject any doctrine of collective guilt and insist on individual responsibility; every one shall be punished for their own sin and "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father". Nothing in the New Testament, when properly translated, challenges this insight.

The false teaching on this matter has infected both Catholic and Protestant traditions (though much less the Greek Orthodox which has never had to rely on Jerome). However, it was challenged by Abelard, on grounds of logic (we cannot be guilty at all until we freely co-operate with evil), and among others, in the 1600s, by Jeremy Taylor, on the grounds of the proper translation of the Greek text.viii In 1938, in an important report made for the Church of England, the distinction is affirmed, and while belief in 'original sin' is accepted, belief in 'original guilt' is rejected.ix It is sad that to this day so many people reject Christianity because it has been presented to them in the form of a caricature, and this is one important example of such caricature.

The fifth (and final) characteristic that I shall consider here concerns the way that the atonement, or our redemption in Christ, is described. Virtually all Christians wish to affirm what we might call the 'fact' of atonement, that is to say, the conviction that what Jesus has done for us, by his life and death and resurrection, is to enable us to be reconciled to God and made 'one' with him. However, when it comes to the attempt to explain how this reconciliation happens, then Christians give different accounts. The early church, while affirming the reality of atonement had no one theory concerning this,x but since the time of Anselm, who died in 1109, conservative Catholics and Protestants have tended to adopt his explanation, often known as the 'substitution' theory of the atonement. Here, the work of Christ on the cross is explained in terms of Jesus paying the price of our sins to the God who demands justice, and hence being our 'substitute', who dies for us, himself bearing the burden that we deserve.

This is one of many places where it is very important for liberals not to be misunderstood. Typical liberals, like myself, are happy to say that Christ died for us, and that without his sacrifice we would not have been able to have experienced the new relationship with God that we believe we have as Christians -- but when it comes to explaining what this means, language about Jesus offering a 'ransom' for our sins (as in Mark 10, 45) is seen as powerful metaphor, not as a literal account of a legalistic arrangement with God. In fact, liberals find the typical way in which the work of Christ on the cross is described, in many evangelical sermons, most off-putting. It is not clear, either in terms of logic or morality, how absolute Justice can be satisfied if someone other than the culprit pays the penalty that is due.

As I have stressed, liberal Christians affirm that 'Christ died for us' -- but when it comes to explaining what this means, their account differs sharply from that of Anselm (great saint and thinker that he was). Here, very briefly I want to add three points of explanation.

First, liberals prefer to think of the work of Christ in terms of his whole life rather than in terms of the cross in isolation -- as found in some sermons. During the whole earthly ministry, ending at the cross, Jesus identified with human life and the human condition, especially its vulnerability. He came as a baby for whom there was no room at the inn. Like the Good Samaritan, he came alongside us, but unlike 'superman' his life was not a kind of fake identification in which he could fly away when then the going got rough. He could not, like superman, catch bullets in his teeth! He was tempted, like us (Hebrews 4, 15.) He cried like us (Luke 19, 41, John 11, 35). I repeat, he shared our vulnerability. Hence the cross is vital, but not as an isolated event, but because his death was an essential part of what it meant to share our humanity.

Second, Abelard is among those who begin to explain the work of the cross in an altogether different way from that of Anselm. The image of Jesus sharing our human life, problems and all, including the pains of death, can draw us to God in a way that no act of sheer power can do. We are inspired to love God, not for any reward, but as a response to the love of God shown to us in sharing our lives. (We love because he first loved us -- 1 John 4, 19.) Moreover (modern commentaries have pointed out), this is not a purely 'subjective' matter -- for here was an act that was both symbolic, and that was acted out within a particular historical event, which has therefore changed what it is possible for human beings to respond to. Acted out symbols can have an 'objective' power -- changing the realm of what is humanly possible.

Third, it should be stressed that Abelard never claimed that his 'exemplary' theory of the atonement provided the whole story. Here, perhaps unexpectedly, I want to quote Billy Graham, who said at a breakfast meeting which I attended in Cambridge "there are many lights that come from the cross". In particular, we need to explore how in the life of the Christian mystic, a human person can find themselves transformed by a special kind of union with Christ in which they seem to participate in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus.

Once again, when it comes to seeing the work of Jesus on the cross, I find an extraordinary degree of caricature, especially among those who reject Christianity. Very often, I too want to reject the version of Christianity that many people have been presented with, and a large part of a proper Christian mission is simply to present Christ as he is portrayed in the gospels.

In conclusion I want to stress that liberals, typically, do not have a 'woolly' approach to belief or ethics. There are, of course, lots of 'woolly' people, but representing typical liberal Christians in this light is yet another example of caricature -- and as so often, of attacking a 'straw man'. Typically, those who belong to the liberal Christian tradition have affirmed the central Christian doctrines of creation, incarnation and redemption. They are not to be confused with, say, those 'radicals' who deny the reality of God. Most of all, they affirm the central point of Christianity that "Jesus is Lord" -- which the Acts of the Apostles makes clear was the first, very simple creed. The heart of Christianity is taking Jesus as our model for how to live and how to pray. Moreover, typically, liberal Christians actually go at least one step beyond a purely existential (but significant) form of Christianity that simply tries to follow Jesus (even if one is agnostic about the reality of God). With St John, they affirm a belief -- a belief in what they believe to be a cosmic truth -- that the Word was made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.

Finally, liberal Christians do not want to form a separate organization or party. They exist within most denominations, and seek to be a kind of leaven within them. The last thing we want is to form yet another sect.